A Self-Deceiving Portrait

Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts —

The Exercise —

Using the first person, write a self-deceiving portrait in which the narrator is not the person she thinks she is - either more or less admirable. You must give your readers clues that your narrator is skewing the truth.

The Objective --

To create a narrator who unwittingly reveals - through subtle signals of language, details, contradictions, and biases - that his or her judgment of events and people is too subjective to be trusted. The reader must thus discount the version of the story offered by the narrator and try to re-create a more objective one for himself.

Well, it was only because she asked me more than once to do this that I am doing it. She had conflicts and couldn't attend to keynote herself. Betty was supposed to do this on her own and didn't follow through. Now here we are, both stepping up. We won't be any good at this. We are not keynotes.

We have no idea how to do this. We will make a mess of this presentation. It will be a flop. Oh well, it is last-minute, and who else could she get last-minute? We train for her regularly, so I suppose she thinks we can do it. What's the difference between what it is we do for her, and this is what she probably thinks? It has been many years of training for her.

Well, I will tell you. We had twenty-nine PowerPoint slides, versus the six that the other keynote speakers had. Granted, they get distributed after the presentation, so if they read them, they will get more of what we would've liked to say. There is never enough time to answer all the questions.

Or to cover all the material necessary to give the audience a clear picture of trauma in the Native American communities. The next keynote I give, I will have six to ten slides and no more. I will practice being succinct. Can I be succinct with the topic?

Then we usually smudge before going on or starting our presentation. We won't be able to do that either in the hotel or at the venue. It really does relax us and helps us to know we aren't alone. Well, we could do it before going on. We can pray, too. We will be okay.

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Author's Note: There was a very good response from the conference organizer and planning committee members. Along with many nice comments from the audience after the presentation.